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Monday, March 14, 2016

The End Of Learning–The Point Of No Return

“I tend to think of the act of photographing, generally
speaking, as an adventure. My favorite thing is to go where I’ve never been.” –
Diane Arbus

www.dianearbus.com
Tolstoy spent his whole life looking for meaning. How ironic, says
Konstantin Levin in Anna Karenina, that we
were created with intelligence, creativity, insight, energy, and passion; and
after a few fitful decades spend the rest of eternity in the cold, hard ground
of the steppes. Tolstoy, like Levin, never gave up and after years of searching
finally conceded the obvious. If billions of people have believed in God, why
shouldn’t I?

www.cbc.ca
Strange that such a genius would have wasted so much of his time. How could
he not have known that despite Aquinas, Augustine, and Tertullian who insisted
on logical conclusions to questions about the nature and divinity of Christ,
that logic and faith do not mix?

After a long and personally productive career, an acquaintance of mine
retired from “a desultory trade” – one, he said, which required little
intelligence, the gift of gab, a tolerance for risk, and no commitment. What
international development did provide was adventure, romance, and the good
life. Surprisingly even the most blighted African countries had five-star
hotels and international cuisine to go along with their unspoiled beaches,
simple interior, and slow, peaceful pace; and Billy Palmer enjoyed every
surprise, unlikely nook and cranny, gentle women, and even heat and dust.

Billy was not just an epicurean adventurer. His intellectual eyes were
open. Why, for example, had even the great African empires left no traces – no
architecture, temples, written record, poetry, or great thought? Why was the
continent still mired in ignorance and poverty while the rest of the world raced
on?

He felt privileged to observe medieval if not stone age culture in the raw.
He was the first white man to have set foot in Makkanpur since the last British
Collector of the Raj visited in 1939. He visited Tuareg nomadic settlements
that had not changed since the Roman occupation of North Africa. He rode 100
miles down the Napo River just before it joined the Amazon and drank ayahuasca
with the Jivaro Indians. As a young man the adventure was enough without
parsing meaning, purpose, development, or future. Yet he could not ignore the
obvious. Here he stood, drinking herbal potions in the middle of the forest
with half-naked, painted, tribal chieftains in 2010. What was that all
about?

www.trekearth.com
In the morning, the Amazon settlement was no different from any other. Girls
collected firewood, women cooked, boys went off to fish in the river, babies
cried, mothers-in-law complained, and men painted themselves for the ritual of
The Leaf, a ceremonial purging of deformed spirits of the dead.

Plus ça change, Billy thought.

In other words Billy Palmer had by the time of his retirement collected
enough information on the nature of human enterprise and the meaning of life to
beggar the pursuits of Tolstoy. Before starting on his cultural journeys he had
always wondered whether people were more alike or more different. In other
words, were all societies, cultures, nations, and empires predictable if not
ineluctable because of human nature? Or were there fundamental differences which
qualified one over another?

He was convinced that he had gotten his answer. Minutes out of the womb we
all acted the same – hungry, self-interested, territorial, aggressively
possessive, and individualistic.

Yet, intellectual that he was, Billy could not stop there. His observations
were anecdotal, probably fueled by an obsessively independent mother who had
taken many lovers without remorse and whose intellectual indifference
(“Morality imprisons. Amorality frees”), thanks to her thorny personality, had
always trumped his father’s temperance. He could not count on personal
impressions; and like Tolstoy had to at least consider received wisdom.

He began his studies with Shakespeare’s Histories. If a concourse of facts
and figures could not describe the human condition, then perhaps fictionalized
versions could. Jan Kott, famous Shakespearean critic, observed that if one
were to lay the Bard’s Histories in chronological order, their themes would be
predictably repetitive. Although the cast of characters might have changed,
their intents, purposes, and plots would not have. Human nature – absolute,
given, unchangeable, and permanent – would always produce the same results.
Whether John, Henry IV, Richard III, Henry V, or Henry VIII, the scenario would
not change, nor would the denouement.

www.en.wikipedia.org
He pushed on to the Russians and Scandinavians; but neither Dostoevsky,
Chekhov, Ibsen, or Strindberg had any other conclusions to offer. Sadly and
ironically, we all were born with exactly the same makeup. Any variations were
cosmetic. Shakespeare’s most fascinating characters – Hamlet, Lear, Cleopatra,
Othello, and Macbeth – are compelling not because of what they do but how they
do it. Drama is not so much conclusion as it is expression. Iago, Tamora,
Dionyza, Goneril, Regan, and Edmund all act in the same venal, morally corrupt,
and self-serving ways but differently.

Harold Bloom, perhaps the premier literary critic of the late 20th century,
was an intellectual Jew who more than any other intellectual of the period
understood the absolute foundational primacy of the Bible in Western art.
Bloom’s esoteric references to Job, Malachi, and Ezekiel were lost on his Yale
undergraduates for whom Wordsworth, Byron, and Shelley should be taken at their
most romantic word. Bloom ruined poetry, Shakespeare, and literature for
Billy Palmer because of his insistence on reference.

www.nevalalee.wordpress.com
During the first years of Bill Palmer’s retirement, however, he finally
understood what the master was getting at and immersed himself in
Biblical exegesis and textual analysis. Finally, he said, he was getting down
to brass tacks. There could be no facile dismissal of John’s first chapter or
the eloquence of Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians.

Yet, after courses at the seminary, volumes of criticism, and helpful
reminders from colleagues who had become Christians, Billy Palmer was
unsatisfied. Unlike Tolstoy, however, who backed into faith, he was simply
tired out.

To the surprise of his wife, friends, and former colleagues, Billy Palmer’s
intellectual interests strayed no further than Victorian fiction. Trollope, the
Brontes, Du Maurier, Hardy, and Walpole were quite enough. They were lovely
stories told from beginning to end – like Dickens, George Eliot, and Sinclair
Lewis. Delta Wedding by Eudora Welty was especially interesting
because it had no plot, no ulterior artistic motive, nor any attempt at
meaning. It was simply the story of a multi-generational Mississippi Delta
family gathered for a celebration.

He began to watch movies again – romantic favorites, whodunits, action
heroics, and comedies. Netflix had long ago dropped Bergman, Herzog, and
Eisenstein from his ‘Favorites For You’ offerings.

Billy Palmer had reached and crossed The Point of No Return. After a certain
point, although one may know only an infinitesimal bit of the world’s knowledge,
that is enough. There are too many predictable similarities in facts to
endlessly pursue them. It is enough to know that human nature underlies all
human enterprise and that all human history will be that of familiar stories of
greed, aggression, patriarchy, and territory.

“You’re just getting old”, said Billy’s wife who continued her work as a
community volunteer and contributor to social causes. Her husband’s new
lassitude and indifference were becoming cause for concern.

Yes, Billy admitted, he was getting old; and the old adage about age and
wisdom finally made sense. He was surprised, however, to find out that such
wisdom had nothing elevating or spiritual about it.
He only wondered why it had taken him so long to realize the unavoidable fact
that life was indeed meaningless; and that any time spent on trying to prove
otherwise was time wasted.

Luckily for him, Billy Palmer had spent the best years of his life in sensuous and sensual adventure. Better to die knowing that you have had a good
run, than to realize that you have learned nothing.